I was exploring the hurt locker yesterday when The Grasshopper offered this: “Hurt is your reaction, not someone else’s intent.”

The guy who flipped you off in traffic recently had no intent of hurting your feelings when he woke up that morning, but there you are attempting to assign your hurt away, to a stranger who’s driven away.

It’s OK that we hurt; it proves we’re human. It’s the next step that keeps hurt in place: making our hurt feelings someone else’s fault or intent.

Seriously, did your high school sweetheart break up with you just to hurt your feelings? They moved on for some other reason other than to spite you, but we may hang on to the notion that they purposely hurt us.

Hurt needs your permission to linger, and one of the biggest permissions we give it is to make it someone else’s fault. We rarely take the time to own our hurt. It is ours but we attempt to convince ourselves that someone else holds the deed.

Assigning scapegoats can go on for a lifetime, if we let it. Better to notice that you’re hurting and feel that hurt without ascribing a reason for it. Reasoning takes you out of your body and into your head where we can concoct more stories about why we’re hurting and keep the cycle alive.

Stories are our attempt to go around the pain of hurt. There is only one way past hurt: to go through it. That means feeling it fully which leads to metabolization and helps it fade away.

Time doesn’t heal all wounds if you don’t accept ownership of them.

A stimulus may always exist: a date on the calendar, a photograph, a smell, a memory that just pops into mind, or any number of reminders. Our hurt reaction will diminish over time if we take the time to recognize our internal upset and give it the time of day. That means to feel it fully rather than attempt to chase it or ascribe it away.

Two questions worth exploring: What is your intent? Are you going to react to hurt and assign it away or will you own it and feel it and alleviate its sway?

All the best,

John